


Don't Look Back: Commander Shepard and the Post-War Consensus

by athousandwinds



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Renegade Commander Shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 22:05:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3225155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/pseuds/athousandwinds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Commander Shepard was the future once," said Senator Raymond D'Souza. "Now he's a past we'd all be better off forgetting."</p><p>Ten years on, our star reporter sits down with Commander Aaron Shepard for a hard-hitting reappraisal of the Reaper War, the Tuchanka campaign and the recent allegations of war crimes committed in the name of galactic peace and stability.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Look Back: Commander Shepard and the Post-War Consensus

When Aaron Shepard was six years old, his feet touched solid earth for the first time. "Everything was so quiet," he says. "I thought there was something wrong with my ears." 

The planet was a high-gravity world in the Attican Traverse, where SSV _Alma_ was stationed after a police action against a batarian slaving ring. The young Shepard was given his first set of combat armour, hastily cobbled together from bits and pieces in the Lost  & Found box, and dropped from orbit in an M29 Grizzly. It was a birthday treat.

"I thought I was being punished," he says, laughing. "I was furious. Suddenly I couldn't run, I couldn't jump; even walking felt like I was pushing through water."

Even nowadays Shepard seems more comfortable above the atmosphere. Down here on his native Earth soil, he seems out of place. He talks about the _Alma_ like most people talk about their hometowns. His mother, Admiral Hannah Shepard, served there for the first eight years of his life, and when they transferred to a different ship he was devastated. In a lot of ways, he says, the _Alma_ was like a second parent. He's not quite being fanciful, either. The shoddy eezo containment tanks on board contaminated him, and two years later led to the frighteningly violent manifestation of his biotics.

"I ripped a hole in the wall," says Shepard dismissively. The logged incident report suggests that the ceiling came down on top of him as well, destroying the officers' quarters on the _Orizaba_. But such understatement is typical of Shepard. After his heroic attempt to cure the krogan genophage during the Tuchanka campaign, his mission report ran simply: "Got through to the Shroud. Mordin did the rest."

It's hard to tell what he's thinking. Shepard has stayed notoriously silent about most of the operations he's been involved in, even those which are a matter of public record like the Battle of the Citadel. Sitting here across from him, his wide, full mouth is closed when he smiles. His eyes are grey-green, flat and murky. I think he might be the most opaque man I've ever met.

Well he might be. I've just asked about Torfan.

Nobody talks about Torfan these days. Its importance at the time – a memorial to the hopes of batarian expansionists; a brutal warning from the Alliance to any other pirates who thought to try their luck; or a cautionary tale about the lengths people like Shepard will go to in times of war – all this has been utterly eclipsed. The batarians can't repopulate Khar'shan, never mind protect their former colonies. The Alliance today has the largest and most effective navy in the galaxy, patrolling three entire sectors just to have something to do with their peacekeeping force. And as for Shepard:

"That was a long time ago," he says. "Let's talk about something else."

He was just 24, and already a lieutenant commander. The bloodbath at Torfan is well-documented: 847 dead batarians, most of whom were known slavers or pirates, and nearly 400 dead Alliance marines, many of them Special Forces. There was no quarter given. Rumours at the time suggested that this was official policy: there is extant video footage showing the point-blank murder of surrendering batarians, for which there has never been any legal prosecution.

"Couldn't say, never seen it," says Shepard, as if this kind of thing is out of his hands. "Email it to Navy legal, see how far you get."

His insouciance is reinforced by experience. Shepard received mild censure from the Admiralty Board over Torfan, mostly related to the heavy number of Alliance casualties. But they seem to have recognised the mitigating circumstances: Shepard was never supposed to have been in command at Torfan and only took over mid-operation after his CO had a breakdown which led to an honourable discharge. A more accurate guide to the feelings of Alliance brass might be found in Shepard's invitation to the N7 program three months later, and his promotion to commander on the first anniversary of the massacre.

More recently, the Admiralty Board took advantage of the chaos during the Reaper invasion of Earth to reinstate Shepard in full after an even more horrifying disaster on the batarian colony of Aratoht. Shepard's defence – that he was forced to destroy the Alpha relay to stop the imminent Reaper invasion – has always sounded weak to his alien detractors and subsequent events on Tuchanka, on Rannoch and during the Battle of Earth have not endeared him further. The Admiralty have not seen fit to question his actions, although one or two krogan splinter groups have attempted to kidnap him for interrogation. Shepard's career, even to the casual observer, has been carefully tended by Alliance brass, much like a hothouse orchid. Admiral Hannah Shepard cradled him, Steven Hackett protected him from reprisals after rumours surfaced about Shepard's pro-Cerberus sympathies, and David Anderson handed him back his dog tags in lieu of due process. He married the grand-daughter of General Hannibal Williams (no longer the _only_ human general to have surrendered to an alien force), and his admirers in the navy number in the thousands. Despite all this, controversy has dogged his heels from the beginning. And nowhere in Shepard's extraordinary career – its exalted heights and its pitiless lows – is there any incident as hotly contested as his role in the Tuchanka campaign.

"Fuck Shepard," said Urdnot Kahak in an official statement on behalf of the krogan splinter group Krantt of Shiagur. "Fuck the Alliance. Fuck all of you."

It was a declaration that initially stunned all but the most intense conspiracy theorists. Shepard was the leader of the ground strike team responsible for the administration of the genophage cure via the Shroud. Until then, despite the tragic failure of the cure, Shepard's conduct had for once been considered exemplary. His undeniable courage in leading his team through a zone under heavy fire from a Reaper destroyer inspired several films in the immediate post-war years, the best of which by far was Merena K'Lonna's _The Father of Tuchanka_.

Just on the face of it, accusing Shepard of sabotaging the genophage cure is bizarre. Shepard was a fierce supporter from the start. He freely acknowledged the necessity of it in order to build his complex web of alliances prior to the Battle of Earth. Lest anyone thought he was too good to be true, he was brutally honest about his motives: he wanted krogan help for his own homeworld.

"But who else?" demanded Urdnot Kahak shortly before his death at the hands of his clan leader, Urdnot Grunt. "Who else had the opportunity? The salarians aren't magic. The cure was made on Shepard's ship. Shepard put it in the Shroud. Shepard killed my sons and daughters."

"That's the kind of lack of imagination you'd expect from a krogan," says Shepard bluntly. "Did you ever hear that insanity means doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? That's the krogan in a nutshell."

He's got a point. While the other races were still reeling from the devastation inflicted by the Reaper War, the krogan were re-arming. Most of them took home the fancy new ordnance lent to them on Palaven as souvenirs. While the quarians relearned how to build houses and the asari descended into a bestial purge of quislings and the indoctrinated, the krogan under Urdnot Wreav attacked the next cluster over. Their rampage eventually came to a slow, stumbling halt when a horrible realisation began to creep through the ranks of the clans. Their forces were being whittled down by the sheer numbers of Alliance troops thrown at them and no babies were being born to replace them.

They'd been had. Possibly.

The krogan response was swift and bloody. Urdnot Wreav was torn apart by his own brothers. There were a rash of suicides, particularly among the women of Tuchanka. Krogan forces balkanised, igniting a horrific internecine conflict over exactly whose fault it was. Some concluded that it was the salarian Special Tasks Group who had, in their inimitable phrase, "exerted their influence". Others believed, with the bitterness of humiliation, that Urdnot Wreav had either colluded or been deluded from start to finish. But no one, until last year, had seriously pointed the finger at Commander Shepard himself.

After Urdnot Kahak's death, others took up the cry. Publicly, voices such as Dhalan Darash, himself a survivor of Aratoht, have added to the increasing clamour for a Council inquiry. (Predictably, the Council has resisted the pressure to question the actions of a Spectre.) But there has also been a less obvious groundswell of support: on the extranet. One forum user, claiming to be an Alliance insider, has flat-out stated that Shepard colluded in the sabotage of the genophage cure. Normally this would be par for the course, except that this "insider" posted authentic data logs from Shepard's ship, the SSV _Normandy_ , showing that salarian Dalatrass Linron made contact with Shepard both the day before and the day after the genophage "cure". What passed between them shall never be known.

Then, of course, there's the missing thirty-two minutes.

In what has become a well-worn sight of Alliance officers closing ranks at the slightest criticism of Shepard, Major James Vega was incensed to hear of the allegations. "I was with Shepard for every minute of that fight," he said to reporters outside an Illium club. "The Commander never touched the damn thing. He'd've had to go through that crazy salarian doctor first – and he loved that guy. Never would have raised a hand to him."

The other member of the strike team, Garrus Vakarian, has declined to comment on the allegations.

Even so, Major Vega's account is missing a few things – thirty-two minutes, for one. In the confusion of battle, Shepard ordered his strike team to retreat while he and Dr Mordin Solus, progenitor of the flawed cure, continued on to the Shroud for dispersal. Shepard switched off his comm when they parted and didn't make contact again for just over half an hour, when he met them at the rendezvous point. What happened in those thirty-two minutes? The galaxy will never know. One party is dead and the other isn't talking.

"Oh, God," says Shepard, groaning, when I bring it up. "I'd rather talk about Torfan. Look, I switched off my comm because I didn't want any distractions." And the dalatrass? "What about her? Yeah, she contacted me. She didn't want me to go through with it. When I did, she gave me an earful. Maybe I should have listened." He shoots a faintly sardonic look at the salarian Order of Merit on the wall. It belongs not to him, nor to his wife Ashley Williams, but to a Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, who received it posthumously for his destruction of krogan breeding facility run by Saren Arterius. "It's not like she wasn't proved right."

It's his attitude more than anything else that convinces me. There's something weary about it; the cynicism of an old soldier. For a moment there, along with the rest of the galaxy, Shepard believed in krogan rehabilitation, and along with the rest of us he was abruptly disillusioned.

Still, one can understand why the krogan are desperate to find someone to blame. The Reaper War amnesty becomes law at the end of this year. After that, there will be no more prosecutions for war crimes stemming from that conflict. Without a scapegoat, the krogan will be forced to admit that the failure of the cure was just that: mechanical failure. Worse, their actions since the war have squandered the goodwill built up during the Miracle on Palaven, so they can count on no help from the rest of the galaxy while their species dwindles.

They're not the only ones still suffering the after-effects of the Reaper War. When the asari purges began, Shepard was one of the loudest voices arguing for clemency – which was surprising, given his paranoia during the war itself.

"He'd jump like a cat at the slightest weird behaviour," said the _Normandy_ insider who posted on the extranet. "We'd have a bunch of VIPs on the ship and he'd have them watched the whole time for outgoing communications. He'd outfit the ground squad out of his own pocket, in case the standard shit had been meddled with. Once, some lab guy murdered his boss – totally reasonable, right? – and Shepard said it was indoctrination. Like no indoctrination I ever saw, pal."

"It's not paranoia if you really are running a top-secret operation," says Shepard dryly when I ask. "Besides, that was wartime. Everything that came afterwards was a desperate attempt by the justicars to justify and excuse the complete and utter failure of their order in a time of crisis. They were ashamed of themselves, and they took it out on the asari people."

His condemnation of the Justicar Order is not exactly a voice in the wilderness. As the purges widened in scope to not just all those who were indoctrinated, but those who might have had telepathic contact with them, the galaxy reacted with varying degrees of horror. The disillusioned Alliance threatened economic sanctions, while Dalatrass Linron offered platitudes, all the time looking as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. (The suspected assassination of salarian Governor Mahli Zirrane remains just that – suspected – as representatives for the STG refuse to confirm or deny any action taken against the one who surrendered Nasurn.) The krogan took three Republican systems in the chaos, which resulted in still more feverish hunting for traitors. The elcor offered sanctuary to any asari trying to escape the purges, and then were forced to retract it when millions of refugees overwhelmed Dekuuna's spaceports. The batarian interim leader on Khar'shan, Talek Gar, flabbergasted the galactic community with an apparently sincere and heartfelt plea for peace and reconciliation between races. Somewhat belatedly, the turians stuck their oar in with a blanket condemnation of the purges. They had of course been busy with a few quick and dirty executions themselves.

Shepard, therefore, had a lot of ready-made support when, in an interview two years ago, he spoke out in favour of a general amnesty. It took some time for the matter to come before the Council, but it was passed by a 3-1 vote in the face of Councillor Irissa's ruthless justicar sponsors. Recently, suspicions have been raised that he intended to benefit himself as well.

"Which is nonsense," says Shepard. "Just about everything I've ever done has been declassified. If someone wants to come after me for it – well, come at me, pendejo."

It is obviously impossible to know if everything Shepard has done has been declassified, excluding the man's own word as evidence. There appear to be no glaring gaps in his record, but then again there wouldn't be. When Alliance Command questioned Shepard about his links with the racist splinter group Cerberus, he told them it was merely a marriage of convenience and they reinstated him the same day. It would take no effort at all to have an intelligence analyst fake a mission report, or conflate two incidents to confuse the timeline, or simply delete a few crucial details. We already know about the missing thirty-two minutes during the Tuchanka campaign. There's another chink in his armour – the most vital moment of the entire war.

"For Christ's sake," says Shepard. "I must be the only soldier in the whole damn fight who has to account for going to the bathroom."

"What _happened_ up there?"

Shepard leans back in his chair. His gaze on me is steady and, in spite of myself, I begin to cringe. I feel rude and guilty, and worse, cruel. It's never pleasant to have to ask questions that you know will cause pain.

Eventually, he says, "When I boarded the Citadel, I was able to make contact with Admiral Anderson, who had run the gauntlet in the same wave and also made it through. At that time he was already badly wounded – by some kind of husk, I think. I don't know. I – we opened up the arms of the Citadel so that the Crucible could dock." He is silent, no longer looking at me, but lost in a dark memory. I am transfixed. The greatest privilege a journalist can have is to be privy to these kind of intimate stories and I can't take my eyes off him.

"Anderson died in my arms. I was still reeling from that when – when Hackett managed to get through to me, to tell me the Crucible wasn't firing. I fixed the problem, and the blast happened."

"What was wrong with it?" I ask softly.

"Why? Does it matter?" It sounds like a genuine query, with a trace of pain, before he shakes his head irritably. "It was a huge gun, it, it needed – calibrating."

The destruction of AI tech in the Crucible blast has come under close examination, with scientists attempting to replicate the energy under controlled conditions, but it has never been successfully done.

"Would you have done it if you'd known the consequences?" I ask.

There is something horrible in his face when he turns to look at me again. "That's a decision I don't wish on anybody." I swallow. I can't bring myself to ask again, so instead I scrabble for an asinine follow-up.

"How did you feel when – "

"I thought I was probably going to die," interrupts Shepard with a curious lack of emotion. He stares past me, out of the window. "I stood there at the edge of, God, I don't even know what, and I thought that I was probably going to die. I'd never thought that before. Even the time I really did die."

He stands up abruptly and goes to the window. "All I could think about was Ash. You'll put that in print, I don't care who knows it. I want her to see it. All I could think about was seeing her again. I've always believed in God, but not in heaven or hell, is that strange? So I couldn't even have faith that I would." He pauses, and then murmurs, almost irrelevantly, "The damage to my cybernetics almost ripped me apart."

I came here well-armed with the facts and figures of what we know must have gone on. I came here with a lot of unanswered questions, the kind of questions about which speculation runs rampant. What happened up there? How did Shepard receive – or even survive – his horrific injuries? I thought Commander Shepard might even have some insight into the whereabouts of the Illusive Man, humanity's greatest traitor, who has been missing since he fled Cronos Station prior to the Battle of Earth.

Instead, I have the story of how Admiral David Anderson died. No one ever really thought to ask. It seemed obvious that he was killed in Hammer's famous final charge, and his body one of several hundred too badly burned by Reaper fire to be identified. The Systems Alliance has commissioned a statue of him to be erected on the plain as part of the war memorial.

"Do you know what happened to the Admiral's body?" I ask tentatively. Commander Shepard blinks for a moment, as if uncertain where he is.

"No," he says eventually. "I passed out for a second there, and when I woke up – I wasn't sure where I was any more."

He hesitates, and then says: "I think one of the Keepers probably took it."

His pause is unnerving. Admiral Anderson's body wasn't the only one squirrelled away by the Keepers. A decade on, teams of cartographers and undertakers, the desperate and the prurient, are still searching the Citadel, remapping the corridors and seeking any remains – even half a dog tag, or a lock of hair. Millions have uploaded their DNA prints to a Council database so that any biological data found can be matched within three years. It's a forlorn hope – but for many, hope is all they have.

Hope, and Commander Shepard. After the war, he became the poster-boy for Alliance values and military strength. His face stares down from half of all naval recruitment posters (his wife, Ashley Williams, constitutes a further twenty-five percent). It's not an image that's substantially changed from the peak of the Reaper War, although the man who gazes back at me now is more scarred and a little wearier. His reputation has only increased, with successful peacekeeping actions in the Nimbus Cluster and the Perseus Veil and a ground operation on Taetrus – all places the Alliance had no place being. But sending in their most famous Council Spectre resolved the issues at hand in a matter of days, and, for reasons not made crystal clear to anti-corruption bodies, netted the Alliance huge concessions in eezo mining, several ordnance supply contracts, and a human-quarian mutual defence treaty that has effectively hemmed in the Terminus Systems.

Despite all these achievements, there are some signs that this love affair is coming to an end. Raymond D'Souza made a speech in the Alliance Parliament last week criticising the new budget's projections for military spending. Most notably, he brought up the heavy expenditure on next-gen Normandy-class frigates, and demanded to know when the Alliance would stop fighting the war.

"Commander Shepard was the future once," he said. "Now he's a past we'd all be better off forgetting."

His words struck a chord. There is a growing feeling at the grassroots of human politics that the Alliance is clinging on to the glory days and expanding an empire it cannot possibly hope to rule.

"'One equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'," says Shepard. I mean to press harder on this – does Shepard intend for his words to be read as support for Alliance astro-colonialism? – but I am distracted. He smiles at me for the first time since this interview started and it changes his whole face. You don't see that expression much in vids. I feel like I'm finally getting a glimpse of the real Commander Shepard. "What's the point of holding back?"

"Do you support the annexation of batarian systems, then?" I ask, but I don't get halfway through the question before he holds his hands up in the air, stopping me dead in my tracks.

"Oh, no," he says. "You're not getting me that way. I don't get involved in politics."

That's an outright lie, I tell him. He laughs. "Besides," I say, "politics seems like it's getting involved with _you_."

He actually shrugs his shoulders. "So what else is new?"

What's new is the allegations published anonymously on the extranet last week in the wake of D'Souza's speech. This is the source of the authenticated contact logs between Shepard and Dalatrass Linron, as well as several other points of interest which re-energised the debate about Shepard's own right to amnesty.

Some of the allegations are the usual conspiracy theory back and forth, like the idea that the Crucible was always specifically designed to wipe out all synthetic life, including the geth. The "whistleblower's" identification of a salarian scientist on Mannovai as the notorious Dr Mordin Solus did cause some excitement. Dr Solus, responsible for the genophage cure (or possibly its sabotage), was supposedly killed during the campaign. His body was never found, but this on its own means very little. Many less important bodies went missing during the war. If he were alive, however, he could shed a unique light on those missing thirty-two minutes.

If. The salarian in question proved to be Safin Lirassa, who was, yes, a doctor, but of oceanography and not anything related to bio-warfare. His superficial resemblance to the missing Solus was more than balanced by a lifetime of inoffensive tax records. One enterprising krogan wrote to the STG and asked if he were an ex-operative. The STG refused to confirm or deny, a phrase that became both ubiquitous and obnoxious over the course of writing this article. Dr Lirassa declined to be interviewed.

"Poor guy," says Shepard. "Someone scrawled 'baby-killer' all over his house, can you believe it?"

The fact is that the allegations are hitting a raw nerve for a lot of people all over the galaxy. A generation too young to have fought have grown up, as younger generations are wont to do, dissatisfied with the world their parents made. Did we make too many compromises? Did we react too harshly? Was there a better way?

"No," says Commander Shepard flatly. I am inclined to agree with the conviction in his voice. Shepard is a lightning rod for discontent, anger and betrayal. With the date of the general amnesty rapidly approaching, his detractors have redoubled their efforts to have him prosecuted for _something_. None of this makes him responsible. 

But there was one person on his crew who disagreed, at least in retrospect. The crew of the Normandy has proven astonishingly loyal to Shepard, even in the face of press blandishments, political bribery and a whole lot of stone-throwing from Shepard's enemies. Admiral Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, of the quarian Patrol Fleet, once threatened to airlock a reporter who asked her too many questions about Shepard's role in the peace process on Rannoch. Not because, she said, he'd done anything wrong, but for fear her words would be twisted and used against him. Major James Vega has been less reticent, cheerfully noting in an interview that the Normandy crew has regular get-togethers. A little digging discovers that one of these parties ended badly last month when a neighbour called the police due to a domestic disturbance. In other words, a fight.

"It wasn't much of a fight," says Shepard, laughing again. But his eyes settle on me, intent, as if waiting for something.

I take a deep breath and tell him. The allegations about Commander Shepard were traced back to former Flight Lieutenant Jeffrey Moreau, who served as a pilot on the SSV Normandy during the Reaper War.

For a moment, he looks so angry that I shrink back in my seat. I didn't want to be the one to tell him this, funnily enough. One of the roles of a good journalist is to be the bearer of bad news, but it's rarely as satisfying as you would like it to be.

But after that terrifying second, his face smoothens out. "Oh, Jeff," he says. He seems utterly calm again. He closes his eyes for a long time. I think he's saddened by this betrayal, but it's hard to tell. It doesn't fit with the blinding rage of a moment ago.

After that long pause, Shepard begins to speak.

"Jeff's not had a great time of it since the war ended," he says. "It was hard on all of us – we were so close, and then to be torn apart, all of us going on to lead very different lives…" He shakes his head. "But I guess Jeff had it hardest. You wouldn't think so – Sam Traynor was living on my couch for a while after she got demobbed, it took months for her to get another gig; Tali's whole squad died on Palaven and Liara damn near had a nervous breakdown thanks to overwork – but I suppose Jeff had a real bad time after he was reassigned. He loved EDI – our Enhanced Defence Intelligence – I mean, we all did, EDI was a member of the crew. In a lot of ways, all the ways that count, she _was_ the Normandy. But I think Jeff was the most attached. Well, most of us were closer to each other, but Jeff was – is – a prickly guy, and I think, maybe, with hindsight, a little lonely. Anyway, when EDI was destroyed by the Crucible blast, he blamed me." He sighs. "I guess I understand. It was my hand on the big red button, so to speak. I feel like everything that went down is on me, you know? But at the same time…" He opens his hands, palm out, as if to convey the impossibility of such a burden. Then he sighs again.

"There's been a whole lot of scapegoating done over the Reaper War," he says. "The justicar purge is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't think it's done anyone any good. And I'll level with you – I'm kinda pissed at Jeff right now." He smiles ruefully, softening the impact of his words. "I don't – I hope I won't stay this angry. I hope someday we can get to know each other again. But until then, I wish he wouldn't make shit up about me and my family."

"What would you say to him, if he were here?" I ask.

"I'd say, 'Jeff, don't do this'." Shepard looks at me with his flat, intent gaze. Against my will I feel the urge to quail. "'Don't make me do this.'"

And just like that, I find the word I've been looking for. Implacable. I can't tell what Shepard is really thinking or feeling. I'm not sure I've ever been able to. All his emotions are locked away behind that implacable mask, and behind safe doors made of titanium, and behind ranks of Alliance soldiers fifteen deep.

All in all, I'm left curiously unsatisfied in my picture of Commander Shepard and doubting everything I've seen from him in this interview. I'm doubting my ability to judge character, and to recognise the truth when I hear it. I believe what he says is true, but would I know if he were lying? More troublingly, would I believe it if he weren't in front of me, a solid bulwark against the changeable political storms?

But there's one last thing he has to say to me.

"You know, I've been looking at your face all interview and trying to place it," he says. "I think I've got it. You're Private Kord, aren't you? You were in November company during the last push."

My mouth drops open and I blink in astonishment. 

"How – ?"

"I remember everyone I ever served with," he says.

Which is the final question. Could someone like Shepard, who knows the name of every serviceman ever under his command, really have betrayed the krogan he fought with on Tuchanka? The geth he brought into the fold? The VI he spoke to every day? Only a monster would be capable of such a thing. And Commander Shepard, whatever else he is, truly isn't that.


End file.
